The Blessing Moon

The words welled up on my tongue, as they'd been fighting to do for weeks now. And this time I let them; I let them pour, sweet and pure and sad and final, and I sang him off as I'd sung off other men, other loves, other evenings, other lifetimes ago.

The ritual lament. The ritual acknowledgement, the ritual cleansing. May we part in peace.

As I was walking all alane
I heard twa corbies makin' mane;
And tane ontae the tither did say,
Where shall we gang and dine the day
Where shall we gang and dine the day? 

In behind yon aul fail dyke
I wot there lies a new slain knight;
And naebody kens that he lies there-o
But his hawk and his hound and his lady fair-o,
His hawk and his hound and his lady fair. 

His hawk is tae the hunting gane,
His hound to fetch the wildfowl hame;
His lady has ta'en anither mate-o
So we may make our dinner sweet-o,
We may make our dinner sweet 

Ye'll sit on his white hause-bane
And I'll pike out his bonny blue een;
With many a lock of his golden hair-o
We'll theek our nest when it grows bare-o,
Theek our nest when it grows bare. 

Many a one for him makes mane
But nane shall ken where he is gane;
O'er his white bones when they are bare-o
The wind shall blow for evermare-o,
The wind shall blow for evermare.

Over again

It is a breath, saltwater on the bathroom floor, a half-choked sob, quickly stifled beneath the hum of corporate HVAC. It is a tearing. It is a pop. A cord cut, and suddenly you are adrift, bereft, on the eddies of freedom. He is for you, but he is not for you. He wants to see you he says, but she says he is not seeing you and so she sees no point in maintaining contact with you herself.

It is surprise. It is the lack of surprise. It is the cowardice you told him you didn't see in him. And the sudden wintry clarity of exactly what this must've been.

You realize with that sickening lurch that you'd been chasing him all this time; running after someone who, after the first few sexual rendezvous, could not get more than warmly excited to see you. Laying out banquets of emotional intimacy, generously giving and laying open invitations... to an empty room.

It hurts.

But only faintly.

And that last part scares you, just a little. You feel things so quietly now, everything constrained in bands of hesitation, of silence, of exhaustion. Even the panic, when it comes, comes softly now. The lists work better, the sharp edges of your personal traumas sanded by skilled and expensive therapists, you feel... less. Or perhaps you only recover faster; you invest less emotionally, display less brilliantly, share fewer desires, take what you can but ask for less and less each time.

And life goes on. A week later you've set the date for the next installment of this secondary-cycle; a brand new face to pore over, searching for clues as you sip cocktails and discuss yourselves.

It's been two months

I left London. I returned to California. I went to Grace Hopper in Houston. I had a great time. I've been turned down for several jobs which I'm not only eminently qualified for, but that actually need someone with my exact skillset. I've been depressed. I've been happy. I've been depressed some more.

I've been neglecting writing. I've been neglecting the meat-suit.  My baggage shipping from the UK is scheduled to arrive next week and that tells me that I've fucked off for about eight weeks. Wow.

It is really hard to write about any of this. It's hard to admit that I've been depressed, that I've been up and down and terrified because I don't know what the future will hold and I feel utterly at a loss sometimes about what will happen to me.

A few days ago I came across one of those Tumblr posts where people post things that they do to self soothe. One of them was "say something you've been thinking out loud."  Without thinking about it too hard, I said to myself "I think I could make it as an independent producer of stuff". I promptly broke down sobbing, alone at my kitchen at 11:45 in the morning.  My skill set is so diverse it makes employers nervous: I'm overqualified for what I've done, but none of my skills slot firmly enough into defined job roles to make me an easy shoo-in for the next thing I want to do.

My skill set is so diverse it makes ME nervous.

And then I realize that it's true, the quote that I only vaguely recall now - if you're not a drummer, the drummer will always jerk you around. Replace "drummer" with "engineers". And so now I'm also thinking of going to code school. Because I'm smart enough to pull this off, dammit, and I'm tired of not being respected in engineering orgs because of my soft skills.  Seriously.

In the meantime I'm applying for jobs. And trying to wrap up a bunch of other projects. And and and.

T-minus Twelve Days

The boxes that stressed me out so badly are gone. £300 or so and they're on a truck headed to a shipping container headed to a ship, headed to Los Angeles and then in some way from thence to Menlo Park. I might see them a month after I return, or I might be lucky to see them before Christmas.

The apartment feels like a husk. Worse than a hotel room which retains its impersonalness throughout a stay; this was once home and is no more. In some ways it's worse than moving, because I haven't seen the "next home" in so long that I've had none of the visceral, animal comfort of knowing somewhere is next.  Now all I have are two giant suitcases, a really large laptop bag, and a reasonable-sized backpack. All STUFFED with things.

And a luggage scale, I should mention. It seemed as I was packing and weighing and repacking and weighing and putting things into the boxes instead, that I couldn't get even just the things I came here with into the bag and be underweight. Humidity? I guess? I sure won't miss the cold drizzling rain.

Then again, I'm hoping the rain starts up as soon as I get home, to be honest. I've been watching the onslaught of burning in California from afar, watching the Valley Fire creep closer and closer to my old summer camp, watching it spread near friends in Fresno, watching it creep up the ridgeline near my Grandma's house in Twain Harte, and hoping that it stops soon. Seriously, the burnt part of California must be larger than the unburnt part at this point, and with an El Niño coming (oh god I hope it is) we're in for some big, ugly mudslides.

I hope it gets cold, and I hope it rains (or better yet SNOWS) like crazy. But... I could use a few days of summer before it starts up, if that's okay? :\

T-minus Fifteen Days

Today, I folded up my sewing table, and then lugged my lovely borrowed Bernina back to its original owner. Suddenly my apartment feels like someone else's place and no longer my home.

My life in the last few weeks has consisted of inventories and decisions about what things I want to keep and which I will leave here. I'm living more or less out of a suitcase. On Monday, they come to take anything not in the suitcases away, and put them on a boat. I may not see them again until just before Christmas. (6-12 weeks? Really?)

I have a general level of anxiety that is simply astronomical. This is far beyond my usual travel anxiety. I am trying to quell it by smothering myself in friends and last-minute research.

I'm missing Folsom. I'm missing Much Ado. California is burning. The economy is wobbly and it's freaking people out. I'm going to Houston to a huge women in engineering conference where I hope to talk to a bunch of awesome potential employers.

I'm also going to be giving another talk at Odd Salon, and possibly be teaching at Dickens. And I feel like I ought to be looking at grad schools rather than startups, or starting my own company or something.

And at the same time I'm looking out the window of this spacious, airy flat with its view of the spire of the V&A like a pinprick on the horizon, and I'm watching the clouds roll ever onwards with their particularly English alacrity and I am both homesick for California and already sadly nostalgic about leaving this place.

I think it comes down to this: I have lots of things waiting for me when I get back. But there's so little sense of place, of community. Six months of not really talking to anyone has not helped this - I now feel disconnected from the tenuous connections I had - and now I feel like I need to start over. A new living space, a new job, a new... something? Direction in life?  Who knows.

Six to 12 weeks, really?

The Things You Miss

It's fully September now.  Yesterday was the first nice bright day in a little over two weeks, and it feels like somehow during that grey, drizzly fortnight the season changed from summer to fall. I know the retailers felt it, because all of the sudden we're into the rich and muted colors of the fall collections. The trees felt it too: the London plane trees, so bare when we first arrived, so green and leafy betimes, have now begun to shed. First a few, nearly unnoticeable dry leaves skidding about. Now the light is thinner somehow, and a little wan, but it filters through the baring branches nonetheless.

Some part of me feels cheated. I don't feel like I've had a summer to speak of. I know that's empirically, emphatically untrue, given that I've been on "hols" this entire time, and that I spent a full week sweltering in a shop in Old Street, and another week sweltering in Spain, and another week cruising the Mediterranean. But those are active summers, summers without rest, summers that do not allow for such things as relaxing and taking in the views or resting a weary mind.

Besides that, I've missed all of my usual signposts of the turning year. These are the things that make me feel that Time Is Passing (tm) and without them I feel as if I'm in a shiftless limbo.  I've missed May Day, two weddings, the Alameda County Fair, the whole entire 4th of July pyrotechnics season, costume college, a handful of Odd Salons and innumerable dances, picnics, and parties.  As I type this - 10am London time, 2am Pacific - most of my friends are enjoying a final evening after the Temple Burn before they begin the process of teardown, return, and reacculturation post-Burning Man.  I didn't expect to miss Burning Man as hard as I currently am.  And that's not quite all - the Gatsby Picnic, which I attended for the first time last year and which I adored, comes hot on the heels of Burning Man. After that, Much Ado About Sebastopol, one of the few Renaissance Faires that I'll attend with gusto - also while we're still here. And Folsom Street Fair happens just before we return so I'll be missing that too.

I feel as if I'm scraping together spilt sand when I say I'm planning to make the closing weekend of the Northern California Renaissance Faire, hoping to hit Burning Man Decompression, and will definitely be going to Le Bal des Vampires. But right now I'm a little lonely, a little depressed, and extremely temporally dislocated.

As a salve, we've been trying to knock things off our touristy "to see" list, and we've been churning through theatrical shows and day trips. This weekend we got through eight things: The Banqueting House (free as we're Historic Royal Palace members), The Ben Franklin House, a trip to Harrod's, and a pub called The Grenadier, then yesterday we caught the Changing of the Guard, went down to Greenwich and saw the Painted Hall and the Observatory, then came back upriver and rode the London Eye.

We live in an area that is below the Heathrow flight path, though not in the window-vibrating sense that I remember from South City or San Jose. But every time I go outside I see a plane arcing overhead towards the west, and some part of me counts the weeks, the days, until that plane is coming for me, coming to take me away from this adventure and bring me home.

Step 3: Forgiveness

Part of the mantra of this excellent reddit thread is forgiveness when you don't meet your goals.

Please forgive me, I skipped an evening. Okay, two. In my defense I as a) hosting the amazing Marion at my house, and then seeing the *super awesome* Bend It Like Beckham the Musical (which as a theater person I was totally amazed and impressed by).

We had a study session at the Museum of London, which was fantastic - we got to look at a number of corsets from the 1850s and 60s, including some very special ones from around 1853. (I can't spill the details too much!)  It's always amazing to me what a little goodwill will get you - I was allowed to "ride along" on short notice after my first visit a few weeks back when I donated copies of my pictures to help flesh out the museum's database. Turns out, object records in large collections are very sparse, so any information is often helpful. Plus, it feels good to share. :)

We followed that with a walk down through St Paul's Churchyard, then south to the Thames and across the Millennium Bridge, past the Tate and the Globe, under the Southwark bridge, past the Clink and the remains of the Palace of the Bishops of Winchester, the Golden Hinde, and through the Borough Market, then took the Tube and a red bus to visit another of the costume community. I love meeting new folks, especially mellow cheerful, incredibly lovely tea-giving new folks.  It was a delightful afternoon.

Right now I'm taking a break from a marathon session sorting, photographing, and inventorying my mudlarking finds for the export license. I'm about... halfway through, I'd say? The Chelsea finds were the biggest bag, and there'll likely be more of them soonish. (It's been WEEKS I tell you. I am ITCHING to get down to the foreshore again, augh augh augh.) Entertainingly, the gent at the Arts Council who's been so helpful so far took a look at my images and went "hm, we only license items over 100 years old, so you can leave out the 2-pence pieces."  The ones I'd left in for scale. Whoops! He advised me to use a ruler next time, which... makes sense.

I'm still feeling a little queasy after this week's food poisoning, but I'm so, soooo much better. We might be headed to Oxford this weekend, or possibly the Cotswolds for some walking, or maybe to Hampton Court for the tail end of the food thing, or or or... so much depends on the weather, which was gorgeous this morning, but is clouding up again.

It's definitely starting to feel like fall here. It's a little disconcerting because I haven't had any of the markers of my usual year to tell me that the summer is passing by. All of my friends are headed to Burning Man. I've missed Costume College and so much more already, and I'm missing Burning Man and Gatsby and and and...  It's a trade off, and one that feels painful right now, but that I expect will have been a bargain when I look back on it.